13th + 14th october, Hamburg

My first tattoo on the thursday was a new customer, she’d booked in to get a gladiola tattoo on her side. Obviously I’d never met her and there had been no consultation with me, so it was a bit of a blind date (something I’m going to work on with the dear peeps at Jungbluth, I prefer to have a chat, even a couple of email exchanges with the customer before we meet for the appointment, to give time to mull things over)
I’d researched the gladiolas (gladioli?), counting petals etc and examining the structure of them to find out what makes them look like gladiolas in case i had to freehand and/or stylise them, but I had to wait and see what she actually wanted before i could plan it all out properly.
We had a chat and a look online at photos of gladiolas, and in the end it was a case of using photo reference and freehand some bits to make it fit.

I thought it worked really well, specially as I’d had reservations because those gladiolas are very upright and rigid looking, not so suitable for enhancing the female form…

Another day, another flower design, this time the customer natalya had been in before so I knew what to expect, except she’d changed her mind from magnolias to hibiscus, but that wasn’t a problem. I knew what we were wanting to achieve here, a more muted, old ‘tinted engraving’ kind of look. next time she’s hoping to add a hummingbird to the top

then i had a fixer-upper to do. All I can say is, if he’d shown up at our studio he would have been sent to Roz for extensive lasering! I couldn’t do that of course, and here he was hoping to have his tattoo sorted out, which I did to the best of my available options, but it was still riddled with compromises. Compromises i wouldn’t have been happy with if I’d have had more time to do this properly.
main thing was that he was happy, and he was. Job done.
And no, I’m not posting any photos of it, I didn’t even take any 😯

I did, however, take a photo of this pile of crap. It’s art apparently. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not a believer in conceptual art and i can’t wait for it to blow over.
This one is called ‘the artwork that doesn’t want to get wet’. Sigh.

also took a photo of this, it translates as ‘two for the price of two’, sounds like the Germans haven’t quite got the hang of good advertising yet! 😆

I also watched a phenomenon called the beer bike, check it out!Party while you pedal